The assignee of the present invention manufactures and deploys spacecraft for, inter alia, communications and broadcast services. Market demands for such spacecraft have imposed increasingly stringent requirements on spacecraft payload capacity. To meet these demands, spacecraft with an increased quantity of antenna reflectors and/or with reflectors having an increased aperture size are desirable.
Launch vehicle compatibility is a second requirement faced by a spacecraft designer. The increased performance requirements are only advantageously met if compatibility with conventional, commercially available launch vehicles is maintained. Accordingly, a spacecraft, as configured for launch, is desirably made compatible with fairing envelope constraints of such launch vehicles as, for example, Ariane V, Atlas XEPF, Proton, Falcon 9, and Sea Launch. As a result, it is very often a requirement to reconfigure a spacecraft from a launch configuration to an on-orbit configuration by repositioning an antenna reflector from a stowed (launch) position to a deployed (on-orbit) position. Some techniques related to this requirement are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,644,322, 6,448,940, 8,789,796 and 8,448,902, assigned to the assignee of the present disclosure, and in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/642,486, assigned to the assignee of the present disclosure, the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference into the present disclosure in their entirety for all purposes.
Improved techniques for accommodating larger and more numerous antenna reflectors are desirable.